One of the hangups we have about the kitchen door/window issue is that a regular sliding glass door, while adding a tremendous amounts of light, wouldn’t look right on our house. We definitely need something a little more “historic”, so I went looking online to see what dreamy options exist (all out of our price […]

Teague has been hard at work on the drainage for the new foundation wall. He was happy to find that our ’93 minivan had enough power to haul 1600 pounds of concrete home from the local hardware store! Now that the concrete has been poured, we’ve got to sit tight and wait for it to […]

The house had some serious drainage issues when we bought it. All of the upper flat roofs of the house drained to the back annex that we are currently deconstructing. The roof of the annex had no rain gutter, allowing all of the run-off from ALL the roofs to drench the foundation and subsequently flood […]

Teague is my hero. He spent yesterday, his only guaranteed day off of work this week, digging a huge trench for the new foundation wall we’ll be needing when we extend the kitchen out 6 feet. He was out there past sunset – what a hardworking guy!

Ladies, the “But I have no upper arm strength!” excuse has just been blown to bits. It turns out a jackhammer isn’t as heavy as you might imagine….. For weeks, we’ve been talking about getting rid of the concrete porch foundation that lingered outside the kitchen door. It was the last piece of the porch […]

It has become evident that since we’re already planning to rebuild the back wall of the house, we could extend the kitchen a few feet while we’re at it. The back annex we’re removing butts up against the kitchen – all that seperates the two is a false wall. At some point, a few feet […]

Hallelujah, I might actually be able to sleep at night – the insurance fiasco is OVER! Well, not exactly over, but temporarily taken care of in that “at least we won’t have to default on our mortgage and lose the house” kind of way. After many, many phone calls to various insurance companies, both local […]

The weather has been our enemy since November, when we first moved in. We’ve known nothing but snow and cold in this house. Winter left us with astronomical utility bills, blankets on our windows, and an ever-growing pile of exterior repair work to be done. This weekend it was almost (gasp) spring-like. I even heard […]

How great is my fiance? I came home from work yesterday to find the walls of our back porch GONE! When he gets into a project, he’s a maniac. He’s a neat maniac, though – he got all the debris loaded onto a trailer, and salvaged all of the clapboard siding, decorative elements, and useful […]

Phase one of the downstairs bathroom is, for all intents and purposes, done. WHOOOO! It looks the same as in previous pics, so I won’t post again but for those who missed it, here’s the money shots. I patched some wallpaper into the closet on Sunday, and painted the remaining trim. Now all we need […]